It’s a disgrace that such an informative period of history is bypassed by so
many schools

Last night, I greeted four coaches of tired 13- to 14-year-old girls and boys back from a post-exam history trip to the Continent. This is the life of headmasters, and a good life it is too. The pupils had spent three days visiting sites of the First and Second World Wars. But this trip had a difference. They also visited the site of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium, about which they had known little, but which had captivated them.

If at Wellington College our young people know little about the Napoleonic era and the Battle of Waterloo what hope is there for those in other schools? Wellington was founded by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1859 as the national memorial to the Duke of Wellington. Yet even here, we have to go against the national tide to teach the history of the period.

The school history curriculum in our schools barely touches the Battle of Waterloo. The First World War is studied intensely, and quite rightly so at this time of the centenary. But thereafter, it is Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, particularly Hitler. Students in schools will have a shallow understanding of 20th-century history and particularly the dictatorships, if they have no conception of the longer term. Napoleon was the first modern European dictator. One cannot understand the modern world without some knowledge of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Every school student should be taught about the violent and compelling French Revolution, which saw King Louis XVI decapitated by the guillotine. Napoleon sought to promote the ideals of the Revolution, including equality before the law, religious toleration and the promotion of meritocracy, which so threatened the aristocratic monarchies in the rest of Europe.

Failing to teach this period is denying our students extraordinarily rich opportunities to enhance their understanding of the birth of the modern European world. It is a national disgrace that students at large do not study this period in any depth.

The Battle of Waterloo was one of the most decisive battles of modern history. It emphatically ended the rule of Bonaparte who, again and again, had tried to dominate Europe. Waterloo emphatically ended his 20-year career, which began as a young Commander-in-Chief of France’s Army of Italy, when he won a series of battles against the Austrians.

Waterloo was a day of extraordinary drama, whose outcome swung back and forth, and which has much to teach about contingency. For sheer heroism there is hardly a better battle to study, aided by it being one of the first battles in history for which we have ample eye-witness accounts. It is hard to imagine any student not being captivated by the extraordinary events of the day.

The battle teaches us about leadership, with two of the greatest military commanders in history facing each other: the stoical and conservative Wellington against the flamboyant and expansive Napoleon. Students can learn so much from studying these men, whereas they have nothing to learn of value from the deeply damaged Hitler, other than what a sick and disgraced mind can achieve.

Students can learn, too, about paradox. Wellington is painted as the “goodie” in the encounter, whereas he was fighting to defend aristocratic traditions and later sought to restrict the franchise being extended in the Great Reform Act. Napoleon meanwhile is often portrayed as a “bad” man. He was certainly responsible for many bad decisions, including reintroducing slavery, which the French Revolution had abolished. Yet he saw himself as fighting for the ideals of the Enlightenment.

Modern multinational diplomacy, in bodies such as the United Nations, can also trace its roots to the period. The Congress of Vienna first met when Napoleon was still in captivity on Elba. After he escaped, it coordinated the international response. As Andrew Roberts has written, the settlement of European world problems at the Congress of Berlin (1878); the Treaty of Versailles (1919); the Potsdam Conference (1945); the United Nations and the modern G7, G8 and G20 summits – all owe their origin to the discussions that led to the signing of the Treaty of Vienna after Waterloo. It led to 100 years of peace in Europe.

Students need to understand the importance of cooperation between nations in the achievement of peace, and where aggressive nationalism can lead. By studying this period, they learn to understand how and why nations join together in the interests of peace and friendship. They learn that the defeat of France at Waterloo removed Britain’s key rival, allowing it to spend the rest of the century building up its empire and power abroad. They learn how the arrival at Waterloo of Blucher and the Prussians inaugurated an Anglo-German friendship which lasted until the early 1900s.

Finally, I never thought I would say this, but the absence of photography and moving images at Waterloo allow school students a far greater exercise of imagination than when they study the 20th century. The Battle of Waterloo, and the events leading up to and following it, merits study in all British schools. It would be a tragedy if the bicentenary were to pass without this gaping hole in our school history provision being filled.